Poet Lemn Sissay on growing up in the care system, racism and finding his Ethiopian family
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- Опубликовано: 15 окт 2024
- At 14, Lemn Sissay inked his initials into his hand with a homemade tattoo. He didn’t write LS, but NG, for Norman Greenwood, which he thought was his name. Except that it wasn’t. His real identity had been withheld from him since he was born.
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Born in Wigan to an Ethiopian mother, Lemn Sissay was raised in care; first in a foster family and then, from the age of 12 to 18, in a string of children's homes, including the notorious Wood End assessment centre, where he was physically, emotionally and racially abused. Despite going on to become an award-winning and internationally acclaimed poet, the trauma of his harrowing childhood never left him, and has informed much of his work on and off the page.
Today on Ways to Change the World, he talks to Krishnan Guru-Murthy about growing up in the care system, finding his identity as a British and Ethiopian man, and why the care system in the UK is failing children in need.
Produced by Silvia Maresca and Suzannah Rogerson.
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Every time I watch your interviews, I wish I could hug you and tell you that we Ethiopians cherish you and applaud you for all you have done and keep doing.
Our Lemn! We, Ethiopians, love you and are proud of you. We thank you for making us proud.
He doesn’t need the butcher of Ethiopians But he still call support dictator and Genocider Abiy Ahmed Ali. With all crimes against the people of Ethiopia are committed.
@@jackinoassefa3291he didn't say he supports Abiy
@@jackinoassefa3291 He has the right to support anyone he wants. Don’t mess with Lemn. 😡
The one and only Lemn Sessay! Our Ethiopian brother, we are so proud of you. Thank you for sharing your gift with us. Keep shinning..........
I came across WHY when I was talking about my childhood and was recommended to you to watch and listen to your stories
This man is so deep. I felt so much connection. Listening to him felt like listening to myself. I am not familiar with his work, but even the Interview is like poetry. I will make sure to buy his work.
One of the most touching stories I've heard from this podcast series. Thank you. ❤
BLACKS MUSLIMS INDIA ARE THE BIGGEST RACIST IN THE WORLD THEY ARE DESTROYING THE UK
Same
Lemn you are our Ethiopian hero LEMN we are so so proud of you for this world u just are star ⭐️ I wish to meet you in person in here London 😊❤ 🇪🇹🇪🇹🇪🇹
What an incredible individual Lemn Sissay is! He should be an MP so he can teach the rest of them the true meaning of compassion.
you are amazing. I just started watching RUclips yesterday and since then I can‘t stop watching all your interviews. Thank you Lemn ❤️❤️❤️❤️🇪🇹🇪🇹🇪🇹
Powerful Testimony 💪🙏🏼 Thank you for sharing your story Lemn!
I'm listening this interview again and again! You are exceptional Lemn!
What a beautiful man…
Lem came to my school once to help us write poems. Never forgot him great guy!
Even i ever met you I'm Ethiopian & so proud of you. You're one of us & you're intelligent & humbled human being. Keep it up & just to let you know we love you, you're not alone.
Big love from Ethiopia ❤❤❤. Keep shining.
Ethiopians are hypocritical for the peace and they live in hateful their own country
Amazing 👏 i admire you Mr Lemin. And am very proud of you. Am Ethiopian and you too. We are very proud. I see how God choose you. Look how God work through you. You dont have to be sad about your life,mother and the like. You are the most shining 🌟 already.
What a man. The triumph of the human spirit over adversity - Thank you for an excellent interview and quote ❤️
I was surprise to get his interview 's Notification the more i listening his story there is one connection ::
God bless you Lemn
A beautiful person. I read his poem, which is/was painted on the side of the building on Oxford Rd, Manchester, from the top deck of the 143 bus so many times.
You're my idol & huge love and respect from Ethiopia!!
I have as fostered into the care system at 8 weeks old l. I'm Asian Caribbean British but do not belong to any nation. So so brilliant to listen to Lemn Sissay and a joy to listen to him. I've had a deeply similar life story. Discovering our potential though can take a lifetime because you're battling on so many fronts that it can take a long long time to experience that crystallisation of the essence of who you really become from such depth of abandonment and rejection. So interesting to listen to the do called superheroes of popular culture were actually fostered, adopted and yet became heroic. Wow.
He is a hero. 🎉
Please, please, please get married Sir, so you can bring your love, sensitivity and affection to a lady's heart. 🙏🏽 God will help you.
Love you Lemn, as an Ethiopian, you are my brother, my hero, I wish I can meet you in person and just chat chat chat. A lot to learn from you!
I wish you all the best my dearest
Lemin you are strong person! All love to you💌
I love you Lemn 😍 what an extraordinary life!
A mother gives birth and they give away the baby without her consent, this makes me mad, you’re a voice for all those who were made to lose their identity
God Bless U , such a brave man to expose the system, this can help the children were forcely taken away from parents...like the Ireland and force adoption scandles still...hope more organisations to set up to dissolve this type of evil networks.
His father was a brilliant pilot who could afford to send him in one of the best private school in England. This is what happens when systems filled by people whose attitude towards others are is wrong.
His father was from Tigrai Ethiopia 🇪🇹
He’s delightful.
Your bibliography is posted on big wall in side Amazon AF MAN1
So everyday when I finish work see your face and saying what a great story and wonderful man and read the rest of your history from Wikipedia but now heard all of it from you
God bless
Such a great interview ❤
thank you.
Leminiye....The Almighty Has your back.Keep on shining.Be grateful,expect the best,but most keep your Faith strong
sending hugs and prayers.
The blood that runs in to you is Ethiopian. We proudly call you ours. Greetings from Ethiopia !
His strong DNA Ethiopian made him survive all good and bad occasions. an amazing person ❤️
Lemn you are very inspiring and eye opener. Your countryman in diaspora
When i am thinking of Lemn and Prince Alemayehu i feel very sad.
Unique and the only Ethiopian essence is that true cherish smile 😃. I just learned about him. Childhood trauma is real.
Infinite Gratitude Brother Lemn & Channel 4! I/WE Love You/Y'all Soooooooh Much! Shalom, Namaste! 🌄🌌🥂
Shine on 🌟🙌🏼
Our Ethiopian brother lemin ❤ we love you, God bless you 😊
Love his work, great interview.
Dr Lemen Sisay the chansler of Manchester University we Ethiopian proud of you.
Used to work for rotherham councils children services. I've never seen such racism within a work place. If you did what you were contracted to do you were disciplined. Girls attempting suicide were at night were told and forced to attend education the very next morning. I worked nearly a decade for them and constant agency staff with no crb
That is what happens without centralised adoption.
There is no ability for the system to self regulate if it is a disordered anarchy of uncooperative providers.
All nations need far more centralised adoption, with a strong agency that has authority, powers, resources and suborganisations to control and progress orphan care. This system is centuries out of date.
@@asekuvenaIs there another name for centralised adoption? I’ve tried googling to learn more (super interested as a public policy student & would like to learn more!) but couldn’t find any resources 😢 Would be VERY grateful for any advice/further clarification! Many Thanks 💗
Having a national agency responsible for dealing with adoption. This improves efficiency, as measures are much easier to enforce like:
• Regulation to make sure the local adoption centres and organisation are being efficient and improving child welfare
• Standardisation, to make adopting easier
• Coordination. So children can be adopted far from where they are and can be easily moved. Resources can also be moved this way
• Specialisation. For example building a very big facility for housing orphans. Or a big facility to educate them.
• Procurement. It is easier to buy things for orphans if you buy in bulk and can invest more in supplier relations.
• Research. It is easier to figure out what is happening with regards to orphans and orphanages if there is a national agency. It is also easier to research how to make the system better.
• Promotion of adoption and behaviours that optimise around it. It is easier to advertise adoption services to potential people if resources if done at a national scale. It is also easier to campaign 🪧🪧🪧 to raise awareness of how to make adoption a smooth and effective process.
• Having orphans be *officially* the children of the state or the national adoption agency. This is good for morale as it makes them seem less orphan-y. Plus, it makes the state able to easily do the paperwork for what a human parent usually does.
• Connecting orphans with organisations. Mostly so it is easier to get them in vocational training and volunteering to improve their human resources and life prospects.
I said centralised, because technically private and NGOs could do it, as well as the government.
India 🪷 has a weak one in the form of CARA. Mostly because it aligns with Indian core values of national unity and institutional development.
Though, every nation's adoption services are pretty decentralised. A lot of the time adoption agencies just run by themselves and the state is only involved last minute, when doing the documents to make the parentage official. The agencies do not tend to work with each other and if they did it would be a headache, because there is no central authority to make the process run smoothly.
Centralised adoption means every adoption organisation is the subject of the national adoption agency and has to follow their regulations. This can be low level authority, where it is mostly for paperwork and standardisation, or high level authority where the local organisation's major decisions are all done by the national adoption agency.
Adoption is something that has needed reform for centuries. The current system is antiqued 🧓 and causes a lot of unnecessary harm from inefficiency.
@@juji5427
My guess is his mother was very young when he was born. It's certainly not the case that all single mothers were taken into the care of the authorities in mother and baby homes. My own grandmother, for example, had two children in the late 30's, when she was in her early 20's, and she raised them on her own. However, she certainly faced ostracism being an unmarried mother, especially from the Catholic Church, which dominated the community. Come to think of it, my grandmother may have been put under pressure to put her children up for adoption but it's not something she ever mentioned.
Lemn❤❤❤
When you said Mohammed(S.A.W), peace be on him that was the moment I realised how much Ethiopians respectful of other religions and culture
More than just being respectful. If you read the Quran, it’s actually there the fact Ethiopia ( Abyssinia) back then gave Mohammed’s followers refugee and saving them from getting prosecuted in Saudi I believe. Bear in mind, the king at the time was not even Muslim.
Fast forward, today the so called muslim Saudis are mistreating and deporting Ethiopian citizens.
Beautiful Soul ❤
You're amazing God bless you ❤
I don't understand why his mother didn't return to Ethiopia, the country of which she was a citizen, where, as he says, people would have been there to help her. Would these people have been her family members, or maybe family members of the Ethiopian father? She came as a student, probably without her family members, so there was no family in England to take care of her. When he says she "was sent" to a care home, was she forced to go there by the police? Did she have the choice to stay in the accomodation in which she had been residing when she got pregnant? Did the Ethiopian father know she had given birth to his child? Did he provide any support to her? Has he ever contacted his father or his father's family?
no one would've helped her in Ethiopia because they dont have much and have their own kids. That is why she was in the UK, most likely to make money and send it to her family.
Was sent to care home because it was a policy of the day by the uk gov.
In Lemn’s autobiography “My Name is Why”, there is a reproduction of a letter from his mother, Yemarshet Sissay, written in 1968 to Wigan social services, asking how she can get her son back, to live in Ethiopia. She had initially gone to the UK to study and found that she was already pregnant when she arrived. She was persuaded to place her baby into foster care while she completed her studies - she was led to believe that this would be a temporary arrangement, but the social worker changed his name to Norman and placed him with the Greenwood family on the understanding that they would be able to adopt him long-term. Yemarshet then had to return to Ethiopia unexpectedly, because her father was dying. The Wigan authority did nothing about her request to have her son returned, though they did keep the letter on file, which Lemn finally found many years later. Lemn’s father was a pilot for Ethiopian Airlines and he used to fly Emperor Haile Selassie around, but he died in a plane crash in 1972. Lemn’s mother and he were not together, and after Lemn finally found her (she was working for the UN in The Gambia at the time) it took her many years to reveal his father’s name.
@@tml_moana6378 He said people there (Ethiopia) would have helped her. I wonder why she didn't travel to Ethiopia to give birth. Foster care should always be the last choice, sending a child to be with their relatives is always better. His father could have provided some financial support to raise him with his relatives. It is emotionally wrenching for a child to be placed with complete strangers, and then to be moved to other strangers. Sometimes, in the case of deceased parents, there is no choice, but a career is not worth this pain for a child. I'm shocked that the UK foster care system would promise to take a child for a few years and agree to return the child. I think they will do this only when the parents are incarcerated. Although I have heard of cases where adoptive parents believe children are orphans, only to find out later the parents are alive and are expecting the child to return to them after the child has grown and completed their education. The adoptive parents have been deceived, too.
@@cherylk.2474 Such cases are shocking, and I absolutely agree with you that placing a child in the care of the State should always be the last choice. It's important to remember that what happened with Lemn Sissay happened 57 years ago, when attitudes in the UK towards unmarried mothers were very different from today. Another thing to remember is that this was pre-IVF, and back then couples who couldn't have children of their own but wanted a family had no option but to adopt, so the babies of unmarried mothers were sometimes seen as a commodity to fill this demand. That doesn't make it right, but it's what happened.
I don't know why Lemn's mother didn't return to Ethiopia to have the baby, but I imagine it may have had something to do with the fact that she had saved money and got a visa to study in the UK (no small thing), and perhaps she thought that if she left, she wouldn't easily be able to return. The fostering was probably presented to her as the best short-term solution - the baby would be well cared-for while she completed her studies. She was only in her early 20s, at most, and living in a culture she wasn't used to. I'm sure she had no idea of what would happen.
As far as the father supporting the baby is concerned, I think that was unlikely, given that she described him in her letter to Wigan Social Services as 'the cruelest person in the world', though she did say that for the child's sake, she needed to make an arrangement with this man: "Lemn needs someone to take care of him. He needs to be in his country, with his own colour, with his own people. I don't want him to face discrimination." The Children's Officer replied to her letter by saying that they were very surprised to hear that she was back in Ethiopia, and that "he [the baby] is in very good hands at the present time, and is with excellent Christian folk who are doing very well for him." They refused to give her the name and address of the family. There is a file note in 1974, six years later, saying that the Greenwoods considered Norman (Lemn) as their child and would like to adopt him but feared that "investigations may lead to his mother," so they were totally protecting their own interests.
Yemarshet Sissay had to flee Ethiopia at the time of the Civil War, which broke out there in 1974, She is, I believe, still alive and living in New York, and Lemn appears to have a good relationship with her. The reasons behind her actions in 1967 are personal to her and I guess the world at large may never know.
The movie “ Philomena “ those adaption agencies. God will punish them. You are an ETHIOPIAN to the core. ለምን ሲሳይ ♥️🙏💚💛♥️🙏
❤❤❤ you are strong 💪
❤❤❤
Many Government’s mistakes that nobody has been hold accountable for.
His father was pilot 😊
I am late to know the histry of lemn my kin my citezs history and I felt sory. I am sory why I late to know him as well as about him. That is because of my negigence, one and Now I am very proid of him, so I will aske him an apology when ever l meet him.
Just like a cheetah, he got his Ethiopian look 😁. I honestly clicked on this vedio, because of his Ethiopian look.
Likewise, Princess Alemayehu Tewodros also stolen from Ethiopia by Royal family, we need historic justice!
A child in care is not legally parented by the government.
I think all children in orphanages *should* be made the legal children of the state, but it is not the case now.
The government shares legal parental responsibility with the parent of the child is in care currently.
That is not the same things as being the legal parent of the child. That is a watered down version of the rights and responsibilities human parents get 😠.
@@ashoahmed7391
Let's do a Poem together. Tiffany Lancaster.
I am shocked to hear him saying that proudly about the criminal prime minister who has slaughtered over 1.2 million Tigrayans and continues to kill others both in the Amhara and Oromia regions. He should be ashamed for ignoring to mention about the criminal Ethiopian authorities who have made Ethiopian to be known as starving people. Instead, he tries to glorify the criminal prime minister as peace noble prize winner not mentioning about the crimes that were being committed by the criminal Ethiopian prime minister.
No way I can sit through this but does he, by chance, mention he’s black at some stage??
yes he does , and he is a victim because of it
Keep going kiddo. @@shamusshamus6251
why would he not mention that?
He said he is Ethiopia ==he is saying he is an African ::
Lemin not Lemn
ለምን